Opeth: Blackwater Park/Deliverance/Damnation

I reviewed some reissues of Swedish progressive death metal band Opeth's early 2000s output for Spectrum Culture. I've been an admirer of Opeth for a while, though it's been years since I've listened to these three albums (I prefer the LPs that bookend them), but I still love Opeth's approach to prog rock, favoring atmosphere and mood over mere virtuosity. I was surprised at how much more I enjoyed Damnation this time around, finding it to be more of a gimmick back when I listened as a teenager. It may even be my third favorite Opeth album now after Ghost Reveries and Still Life.

My full piece on these reissues is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Extraterrestrial (Nacho Vigalondo, 2012)

I wish I could better put my finger on what felt amiss about Extraterrestrial. There's nothing really wrong with the movie: it follows its low-key mash-up of not-sci-fi and not-romance to a strangely logical conclusion, and the writing is often deft and funny. But the movie just...lacked something, working on the level it chose but not truly playing with convention like it thinks it does. It's a film stuffed with potential, but not one that rises above merely promising. I've yet to see Vigalondo's much-acclaimed Timecrimes, and I look forward to it even more after seeing this, especially if it proves this above-average but somewhat middling affair is merely a passable sophomore slump.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Corpo Celeste (Alice Rohrwacher, 2012)

I have a love-hate relationship with realist cinema, a love for the movies that genuinely capture a naturalistic tone while also evoking something, and general antipathy for anything that sets realism as the ultimate achievement for cinema, ignoring the boundless possibilities of the art for something so banal. Corpo Celeste, Alice Rohrwacher's Rosetta-esque first feature, gets somewhat caught in between these two extremes, though it leans far more toward the former pole than the latter. Aided by a phenomenal performance by its child lead and some clever but not over-aggressive views of religion as a limiting social function, Corpo Celeste is a promising debut and a fine film its own right.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

A Tale of Two Vampyres

My latest piece at Spectrum Culture is a comparison between F.W. Murnau's seminal Nosferatu and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake starring his greatest on-screen collaborator, Klaus Kinski. Murnau's film is justifiably one of the hallmarks of silent cinema, a masterpiece of editing and framing in which the mere setup and execution of a shot can be as thrilling as the actual monster. But I also confess to preferring Herzog's more laid-back, spiritual take on the same material, replicating much of the original but stretching everything until it emerges vastly different in tone.

My full comparison is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Paul Williams Still Alive (Stephen Kessler, 2012)

I love Paul Williams. I love his songwriting, and I adore him as a record producer/Antichrist in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. But I loathed Paul Williams Still Alive, a documentary about the musician climbing his way back after years spent in the druggy wilderness and subsequently push for sobriety. This can be attributed to one Stephen Kessler, a never-quite-was director who openly seeks to make this film his own comeback and therefore makes himself the true subject of the documentary. His narcissistic rudeness is overpowering, and his "I'm the real story!" antics make those of Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore look like Steve James' professionalism. One of the worst movies I've seen this year.

My full review is at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #13: Alan Greenberg—Every Night the Trees Disappear

A Werner Herzog film shoot is an invariably absurd, harrowing thing, and few matched the intensity and insanity of the production of Heart of Glass. At least, that's the impression I got from Every Night the Trees Disappear, a revised edition of the making-of book written by Alan Greenberg, one of Herzog's early admirers, friends, and witnesses. Greenberg packs his diary with stories of Herzog philosophizing madly, controlling his actors through hypnosis and fear, and treating a pile of dead flies with more reverence and respect than human life. It's a mad tale, but also one that reveals a great deal about how Herzog works, and how he thinks.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. (Léa Pool, 2012)

Forgot to link to this last week as I was caught up in my Top 100. Pink Ribbons Inc., a repetitive Big Issue documentary, nevertheless does a service in challenging lazy, self-satisfied attitudes toward the disturbingly commercialized breast cancer movement and how moneyed interests have steadily taken over a good cause. Pool's interviews cover her bases in not criticizing the pink-clad people on the street who think they're making a difference even as analysts not so subtly suggest these people are deluded. What elevates the film is that, unlike most social issue documentaries, it doesn't preach to the choir, instead taking issue with a universally assumed good and reveals just how bad it can really be.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Criminally Underrated: The Limits of Control

I loved Jim Jarmusch's divisive (to say the least) post-modern noir when it came out in 2009, and finally watching one of its biggest inspirations, The Lady from Shanghai, inspired me to revisit the film. If anything, I love it even more, so I had to write about it for my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture. This new piece incorporates some of the views I expressed at the time, but I tried to refine the more scattered thoughts. Not that any succinct summary could ever capture the intoxicating beauty of what Jarmusch and Christopher Doyle shot.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2012)

Empty but gorgeous imagery, filled with references to other movies and heavily indebted to Kenneth Anger. No, it's not a Nicholas Winding Refn film but Beyond the Black Rainbow, a low-budget throwback gem from Canadian filmmaker Panos Cosmatos. With a stark but smooth, even John Carpenter-like direction, Cosmatos descends into a head trip that takes its cues from '70s and '80s sci-fi movies even as it proudly stakes out its own territory. The film's Oedipal trappings are just add-ons, but the true delight is wandering around the director's hazy headspace, filmed with striking colors, soft focus, and thick grain. Maybe not a great film, but an intoxicating one.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)

As weird as Twin Peaks was, the idea of watching a film that worked as an anti-closure prequel to its cliffhanger finale and alienated what fans of the show remained kept me away for some time. But I finally watched Fire Walk With Me and found it not only to be worthy of its companion show's legacy but almost certainly the best film David Lynch has yet made. At once the most obscure and the most immediate film in Lynch's canon, Fire Walk With Me attains a despair unabated by the usual Lynchian grotesque, yet it also finds the strangest form of hope. And wouldn't you know it, even though it ends where the show began, it does give answers for the series' close. They just happen to be emotional ones, not narrative.

Check out my full piece up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)

I've been meaning to watch The Lady from Shanghai for YEARS, yet inexplicably it kept falling between the cracks. But I finally watched it and wrote about it for Spectrum Culture. Needless to say, I absolutely loved it, and in fact I found it to be perhaps the most immediately entertaining of Welles' features, despite being one of the murkiest and oddest alongside Mr. Arkadin and F for Fake.  Most of the films I could compare it to came well after it, with only Renoir's 1932 La nuit du carrefour doing something similar before it. Gorgeously shot yet openly farcical, this is one of the best noir deconstructions.

Check out my full thoughts over at Spectrum Culture.

Re:Generation Music Project (Amir Ben-Lev, 2012)

I never know where to stand on DJs, so I was glad to watch Re:Generation Music Project, an effort to prove the artistic validity of this sort of music. I loved watching each DJ pore through his assigned genre, some of them coming to appreciate that which they had previously ignored (I'm especially thinking of Pretty Lights initially disdaining country then growing to truly admire it). There are some irritations, chiefly in the form of that insufferable know-it-all Mark Ronson, but overall I came away with a new respect for what these people do. DJ Premier's work with classical music in particular is one of the most entertaining, inspiring things I've seen this year.

My full review of Re:Generation Music Project is up now at Spectrum Culture.

A Tale of Two Pelhams

Spectrum Culture has a fun new feature that compares and contrasts remakes of films with their original versions. It's already made for some great reads, and I finally got around to writing an entry of my own. For my piece, I stacked Joseph Sargent's 1974 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three against Tony Scott's 2009 remake. I found both to be fantastic pieces of popular entertainment, one an unpretentious thriller that embodies mid-'70s ennui and grime, the other a frenetic, color-soaked reflection of post-9/11 and post-2008-crash America. Both are smarter than they seem, though Scott's film is a bit more eager for you to know it. A rare case of two totally valid interpretations of the same root material.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Geoff Dyer — Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

I mentioned reading this a few weeks back and that a full review was on the way. It's finally up at Spectrum Culture. Zona was a great read, illuminating in its anecdotal production details but best for Dyer's beautiful, sometimes poignant thoughts on one of the greatest of all films. There are some hiccups and digressions that grate, but for the most part this is one of the best books on a single movie I've yet read. Highly recommended.

Check out my full review now at Spectrum Culture.

Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau, 2012)

I'm afraid I didn't particularly take to Monsieur Lazhar, the classroom drama that received an Academy Award nomination for best foreign-language film at this year's Oscars. Trying desperately to avoid the usual pitfalls of moralizing, treacly schoolyard films, Lazhar ultimately loses the thread of its subtle expression and simply treads water. It also makes obvious what had earlier been broached with such elegant subtlety that I couldn't help but feel let down by its lack of faith in the audience. Its resolution is easily uneasy, downbeat in that facile manner that strives for ambiguity but effectively seals off the narrative. There are some fine performances, but the whole failed to stay with me.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Beat Hotel (Alan Govenar, 2012)

I know so little about the Beat Generation. All I was taught in school were excerpts of On the Road and a shambles of a class reading of "Howl" in college. So in the dark am I regarding the nuances of the movement that The Beat Hotel, Alan Govenar's slight but engaging documentary, was more educational than all my English-department forays into the Beats put together. Offering a fondly recalled overview of the dingy Parisian roach motel for ex-pats, The Beat Hotel helped clarify the links between the Beat and Lost generations and how the former is the more harrowed, paranoid iteration of the latter. Anecdotes are touching, amusing, even a bit frightening (usually the ones involving William S. Burroughs), while the remembrances of the surviving witnesses of this time period are all universally the best kind of old person, the type who have just aged into great storytellers. It's overlong (despite only being 80 minutes long), but the movie does do a service to a still-underappreciated moment in our literary history. Besides, it made me run out and go buy Naked Lunch after finishing.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005)

I've been meaning to write a defense of the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (one of my favorite movies of the Aughts), for some time now, so I knew what to choose for my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture. The theatrical cut is an admittedly mediocre movie, stressing Gladiator-esque action in an attempt to cash in on Lord of the Rings. The director's cut, however, belongs with films like Munich and Gangs of New York as some of the finest American filmmaking to seriously address the War on Terror and the modern context of endless infighting, wrongheaded wars and relativist righteousness, typically through the prism of the past. All three films (even Gangs, which concerns the American Civil War, not ages-old Middle Eastern conflicts) suggest a cyclical movement of violence from outside forces that creates seemingly endless fighting that eventually tears apart people from the inside. Kingdom of Heaven takes (even) more liberties with history than the other two, but its fundamental position, that peace, however tenuous and short-lived, is preferable to senseless war, is delivered with a nuance I've sadly come not to expect from Scott.

My full piece is up at Spectrum Culture.

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

My love of the handful of Jane Campion works I've seen inexplicably failed to get me to watch The Piano with any speed. Happily, I finally got the chance to rectify my error for Spectrum Culture, and now I'm kicking myself even harder for waiting so long. Like all the other Campion movies I've seen, this is fantastic, feminocentric yet universal in its scope and emotional resonance. Her direction should rank her among the all-time greats, and her marginalization post-Piano is outrageous. The Piano in particular turns the period piece on its ear, breaking up convention at every turn with her idiosyncratic, singular camera. Its anti-male gaze distance ironically affected me more than the usual intimate, forced wringing of emotional response. It's not my favorite Campion film, but I can see why it won the Palme D'Or.

My full thoughts are over at Spectrum Culture.

This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2012)

I've been wanting to see this film since I heard it was smuggled out of Iran in a cake, and boy did it not disappoint. This is a vital film, probably the most important of my lifetime. One of my favorite Internet writers, Sheila O'Malley (who also ran a fantastic Iranian film blogathon last year to which I contributed), compared This Is Not a Film to Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. I honestly can't think of a better summary. Panahi's filmed limbo is wrenching and outrageous, and his sadness comes not from his fear of prison but the idea of not being able to make art anymore. But even as he despairs of this, he makes what may be his greatest artistic statement yet. Along with Film Socialisme, no other film so optimistically looks at the possibilities of the modern era for filmmaking, and for protest. The Iranian government can firewall the Internet to prevent communication on Twitter, but people will find ways around those blocks. They can take away Panahi's camera, but he still has his iPhone. As infuriating as the injustice behind This Is Not a Film is, rarely have I seen a film so inspiring.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Robert K. Massie — Catherine the Great

This could have been a great text. Instead, it feels more like a very good introduction to Catherine II for middle schoolers, maybe high-school freshmen or sophomores. It is a genuinely engaging read, however, wonderfully paced and informative with the exception of one too many esoteric asides. Massie has a clear enthusiasm for the material that generally overpowers the nagging realization that he offers no particularly revealing insights on the subject. Overall I gave it a positive score, though I admit it made me look for superior biographies of one of Russia's most fascinating rulers (and therefore most fascinating rulers of any nation).

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.